In order to swing across the city, Spidey attaches his web to buildings along the street and swings in a motion that’s an exaggerated version of how monkeys move from one tree branch to the next. I picked up how it worked almost immediately and so did my 9-year old son. And while the swings feel authentic, they require some bending of the real-world forces.

“Day one, we started looking at textbook pendulum motion swinging,” says the game's director, Ryan Smith of Insomniac Games. “The biggest problem was the sideways force.” An object anchored to a building would naturally swing toward the building itself, which makes it hard...